Hospital infections pose a serious risk to patients. To reduce the risk of infection, hospital wings are constantly sterilized. However, there are items that remain difficult to clean, especially medical tubes such as surgical drainage tubes. Surgical drainage tubes are very difficult to clean, and debris can build up quickly and cause an infection. Consequently, there is a need for a device that cleans the interior of medical tubes, thereby lowering the rates of infection.
Known devices for cleaning tubes are described in, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,194,452 to Sanderford. The Sanderford patent relates to a hand-held instrument pivotally connected at one end with rollers, and adapted at the other end to squeeze tubing between the rollers to clean the interior portion of the tubing. The Sanderford patent shows an in-line stripping of the tubing by the instrument.
Furthermore, U.S. Pat. No. 5,141,503 to Sewell, Jr. describes a wound drainage catheter with an aperture and a closed reservoir system. The wound draining catheter has of the Sewell, Jr. patent has a plug and a thread for pulling the plug through the tubing or lumen, in order to clear the catheter of occluded material.
Another known tube unclogging device is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,881,916 to Madjarac. The Madjarac patent describes an instrument comprising in combination a U-shaped body having a pair of cylindrical rollers mounted for rotation on each end of the opened end of the U-shaped body, said rollers being oriented parallel to each other and to the sides of the U-shaped body, spaced apart and in relationship for movement into and out of engagement with opposite sides of the tubing.
A further known drain tube stripper is described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,998,168 to Kleimann, Sr. The Kleimann, Sr. patent describes a drain tube stripper containing two handles pivotally joined at one end. The second end of each handle contains a roller. The rollers meet when the handles are pressed together. The handles are of unequal length. A drain tube, e.g., surgical drain, can be stripped of fluid and material buildup by placing the open rollers over the tube and pressing the handles together. The rollers thereby pinch the drain tube and the rollers allow the device to be moved along the drain tube pushing fluid and material ahead of the rollers. The drain tube stripper allows the tube to enter between the rollers from the side and exit from the side of the opposing handle. The tube drain stripper may also contain a guide component to minimize entanglement of the drain and the device is rolled along the drain tubing.
These known tube stripping devices are complicated, and are prone to breakage and an undesirable seizing up of the rollers in use. These known devices are also time consuming and unwieldy to use. The use of in-line tube stripping too, where the stripping motion is parallel with the orientation of the user's hand conducting the stripping, is further believed to undesirably increase the opportunity for contamination and spread of infection.
There is a continuing need for a tube stripping device that cleans medical tubing quickly and effectively. Desirably, the tube stripping device is simple to use and minimizes a risk of infection in operation.